Oldest Living

I meant no disrespect, but I had forgotten the first commandment of conversing with an elderly Jewish waiter: Watch your words, because what the customer says is seldom what the waiter hears. I was speaking in English, the language of the happy-go-lucky Pilgrims, and he was listening in Yiddish, the language of the long-oppressed Jews of Eastern Europe1. As Leo Rosten points out in his classic work, The Joys of Yiddish, the language "lends itself to an extraordinary range of observational nuances and psychological subtleties."

Mostly, it lends itself to sarcasm, which is why the waiter instinctively took offense. By him, I was a momzer2. I felt his eyes bore into mine for an endless three seconds as he reacted reflexively to a lifetime of aggravating customers, perceived affronts and insufficient esteem. My friend Merrill Shindler, a Los Angeles food writer who grew up in the Bronx, had warned me about the wrath of the Ratner’s waiter, of provoking a look that would "chill every cell," but I was unprepared for such Old Testament scorn. The stare was accompanied by absolute silence, which was just as daunting, because everybody knows that a silent Jew is not a happy Jew. Finally, he spoke, his words cold and flat: "Enjoy your meal." His voice, devoid of inflection, knotted my kishkas3.

At the time of my visit, Ratner’s was about to close after ninety-five years as the Lower East Side’s high temple of the soothing kosher dairy lunch. Throughout most of the twentieth century, a meal at Ratner’s was an immutable Sunday tradition. Jewish shoppers would pick through the chozzerai4 piled in the stalls along Orchard Street and then pour into Ratner’s, filling the 344 seats, even lining up along Delancey Street to wait their turn. Neighborhoods change. The Jews moved away, and the newcomers did not have a taste for baked vegetable cutlets, nor did they bring their children in for a nice glass of chocolate milk with whipped cream. Ratner’s, in some form, may still be there. Plans called for the Lansky Lounge, a nightclub already operating on the premises, to become a steak house called the Lansky Lounge & Grill. Ratner’s was expected to reopen as a non-kosher luncheon spot with about eighty seats. The passing of Ratner’s as I had known it was heartbreaking, but to me it signaled an event of even greater consequence—the end of the era of the professional Jewish waiter.

Once, they were innumerable. They were a multitude of Yiddish-speaking men who came off the boats from Europe and helped feed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants with big appetites and little English. Only Jewish waiters understood such delicacies as broiled kippered herring5. Only they could properly pronounce knish6. They became fixtures at waiter-service delicatessens and Eastern European-style restaurants that flourished in New York from the early twentieth century into the 1970s. Ratner’s waiters, many of them on the job for most of their lives, became legendary, more famous than Ratner’s cuisine. They were emotionally complex and disturbingly moody, tormented by a belief that they had more promise, more dignity and more intelligence than their profession deserved. When I took the F train down there a few months ago, it was to pay my respects to them, not to eat, although while I was there I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a little something.

I helped myself to a few of the incredibly fresh and fluffy onion rolls, then ordered a plate of the famous cheese blintzes, which tasted awfully un-Jewish to me—the thin crepe wrappers were reminiscent of deep-fried Amish funnel cakes7. The person serving me turned out to be a young, dark-skinned, exceedingly gracious Ethiopian Jew, who told me she was the first woman hired to wait tables at Ratner’s. When I mentioned that the elderly waiter working in her section seemed more in the classic Jewish mold, she called him over. I was trying to act like a mensch8, but I thoughtlessly offended him. I forgot that a Jewish waiter without thin skin is like a blintz without sour cream.

Back in the early-to-middle twentieth century, quite a few decades before anybody was discussing food trends or even, for that matter, food, everybody who was Jewish talked about Jewish waiters. Dining out came down to this: You couldn’t live with them, and you couldn’t get a tongue sandwich without them. My father, who is 86 and started eating blintzes at Ratner’s in the 1930s, remembers them as "a sour bunch of people who walked around with towels under their armpits, and then they’d use the towels to clean the tables." When I argue with him that they couldn’t all have been that way, his answer is, "I remember it so clearly because we’d talk about it all the time. They’d all been there ninety years, and none of those ninety years was any good."

Jewish waiters didn’t just pick on Jews. They were nonsectarian, sparing nobody. In January 1961, as reported in The New Yorker, the great British actress Dame Edith Evans, then in her early seventies, was taken to lunch at Ratner’s, where she asked for pancakes.

"Blintzes," the waiter replied. "What kind?"

"What kind do you have?" Dame Edith asked.

"If I told you, would you remember?" the waiter snapped back.

Ronnie Dragoon, who owns a chain of nine Ben’s delicatessens in the New York area, recalls that the era of the Jewish waiters was already coming to an end when he entered the business in 1972, and while he never appreciated their overt crankiness, he admits "they created a certain ambience that’s missing today." Bob Stein, an owner of Eppes Essen in Livingston, New Jersey, says, "They may not have been the greatest waiters who ever lived, but they had a feel for what the customers wanted and they had an answer for everything."

I always cherished them, no matter how disdainfully I was treated, because they were a comforting connection to my Jewish heritage. I knew that if I could somehow get off to a good start with them, which was no cinch, I was in for an unrivaled dining experience, one that incorporated traditional food and wonderfully bad jokes9. If you ate what they told you to eat, and you risked hard feelings if you did not, they might even stop to talk to you, and the best of them combined the folk wisdom of Shalom Aleichem10 with the resigned weariness of the shtetl11. The uncritical affection I felt for them is almost certainly a result of my unconditional failure as a Hebrew school student. My inability to learn the language, combined with a desultory performance at my Bar Mitzvah, caused me to be scorned as a dimwit in the Jewish community. I ended up uneasy with religious formality, but I loved the waiters, who were living Judaic artifacts. That they came forth bearing food helped, because my family, like most Jewish families of Eastern European background, confused food with affection. The primary Jewish token of love isn’t a bouquet, it’s a brisket.

"Henny Youngman was a lovely guy," says Jack Sirota, 68, recalling the famous funnyman and Carnegie delicatessen regular, "but as a tipper, he was a bum. He said to me, ’Aren’t I a good tipper?’ I said to him, ’If this was 1935, you’d be great.’ He said, ’Jack, I tip $1 here and $1 at the Friar’s Club.’ I said, ’You’re a bum here and a bum there.’"

After forty-one years waiting tables at the Carnegie, Sirota has become almost as much a symbol of the Manhattan restaurant as the eccentrically grandiose sandwiches—number thirteen, a turkey, corned beef, Swiss cheese and coleslaw combo, has been known to weigh three pounds. He’s six feet tall, and back in the days when he weighed 310 pounds, he was photographed holding an oversize sandwich for a promotional poster. The caption read NOT ALL THE SKYSCRAPERS IN NYC ARE MADE OF GLASS AND MARBLE. Woody Allen, who used to be a Carnegie regular, cast him as a waiter (no stretch there) in Broadway Danny Rose, but, Sirota says, "Since he married Soon-Yi, I don’t see him."

A lot has changed at the Carnegie over the years. The sandwiches are bigger. Sirota is smaller, having taken off forty pounds. Most of all, the regulars don’t come around as much, now that tourists line up outside and the wait can be forty minutes on a weekend. "Now it’s 99 34 percent transient trade, and maybe 1 percent Jewish," he says. "We put out matzo on Passover; they take a bite and say, ’What’s this?’ "

Sirota was born in Brooklyn and started his career as a waiter in the Catskills, the modest mountain range north of New York City where Jews went to breathe fresh air but ended up spending most of their time in the dining rooms. Few Jewish waiters who worked up there remember those days with less than affection. They were all young, slim, handsome, and made a very nice living. Sirota recalls, with a rueful smile, that he weighed 150 pounds when he worked at the Avon Lodge.

"During summertime the hotel was quite busy, with 500 guests," he says, "but after the Jewish holidays12 I’d go to Canada, fishing and hunting. In 1955 I bought a brand-new Oldsmobile; it cost me $2,800 and included a tank of gas. I had two guns, two fishing rods and no shortage of girls. When I say I was a ladies’ man, I didn’t take them for pizza. For steak. I made a lot of money and lived well. In those days, three drinks cost a dollar.

"It was the best time of my life. One of my special guests in the hotel was Sid Caesar. He was a great guy, very nice; I even played pinochle with him. Sid Caesar was quite a marksman. I would go into town, buy cans of shaving cream, and he would shoot them to see how high they would go. He had a .357 magnum and a high-powered rifle. He wouldn’t kill a fly, but he loved to shoot. His best friend owned the Joyva halvah13 company. They’d fill the halvah tins with seltzer, shoot at them. If you have money, you can do anything."

Finally, Sirota met the woman he wanted to marry, the cousin of his brother’s wife. She didn’t want to live in the mountains, so they returned to New York City, and he went to work at Mirko’s Guitar Room, where he once waited on Carl Sandburg. "You can’t get any bigger than that," he says.

His life is quiet now. He works only three days a week, this sweet, shambling man who seems at peace with the world. While I’m interviewing him, a Chinese American waitress who has been at the Carnegie for fourteen years interrupts several times, angrily and forcefully, to say how difficult Sirota was when she first arrived. Speaking of all the old Jewish waiters at the Carnegie, not just Sirota, she says, "They were were so mean, they killed me."

He lets her have her say, and then he tells me, softly, that times were different then. He had supervisory responsibilities, and it was his job to make sure the customers were treated right. "I used to say something. I don’t anymore," he explains. Just to be sure I know he hasn’t become a pushover, he adds, "Maybe I was that way because circumstances warranted."

The professional Jewish waiter was as much an American original as the workingmen who drove herds of cattle, laid railroad tracks, built skyscrapers. He just moved a lot slower. Bobby Trager, the chef of Nate ’n Al’s delicatessen in Beverly Hills, recalls frequent visits to Ratner’s with his grandmother, who would always treat him to the vegetarian chopped liver he loved. "No waiters ever walked like them," he says. "They walked like they were old, even when they were 25. It was almost like they had a walker, but they didn’t have a walker."

To my friend Shindler, the Jewish waiters were the American equivalent of the imperious Paris waiters and captains who looked down at all who came to their tables, although he points out that "the French waiters smelled of truffles, and the Jewish waiters of schmaltz14". Their motives, of course, were different. The French waiter utilized his sneer to emphasize the superiority of his national cuisine, while the Jewish waiter was only letting you know that his soul was suffering, to say nothing of his feet. "You know," says Marvin Saul, 71, owner of Junior’s in Los Angeles, "Jewish feet are not great feet for being waiters and waitresses. They got bunions. They got flat feet." Adds Seymour Altman, 74, owner of Altman’s Delicatessen in Baltimore, "I can picture today how they schluffed15 their feet, like they had weights on them."

The professional Jewish waiter was not a pretty sight. He was often short, balding and bent over. He predated modern service. He did not introduce himself with "Hello, my name is Irving," but if you were seated at one of his tables often enough, you would get to know him by name, and he would get to know the food you preferred. He was neither impersonal nor polite, as servers are today. He wasn’t quite a Renaissance man, but he was, in his own way, well-rounded, since he often fancied himself a playwright, a songwriter and a gambler; that he was unsuccessful at all three endeavors did not diminish his self-esteem. He suffered, and not silently, for the horses that ran slow, for the artistic works he created that remained unpublished or unsung.

Jack Lebewohl, an owner of the Second Ave. Deli in Manhattan, remembers the illegal second-floor poker parlors that flourished along Allen Street on the Lower East Side, set up to attract Jewish waiters. "They were called goulash joints, because they got goulash for free while they were playing cards," he says. "In Las Vegas and Atlantic City, you get free drinks, but in the Jewish gambling houses it was free food." Larry Leiter, one of the owners of Moishe’s in Montreal, recalls one Jewish waiter who had other vices between shifts. "He’d work lunch, walk downtown, find a broad, take her out for a drink, be back at 5:30 for the dinner shift, work the night shift, go out and party. And he was no young man, either. He was doing it up to the end, and when he left here he was 70 years old. A Romeo, and his wife never knew."

Today, there are still Jewish waiters, but most work part-time. They don’t go to the track. They go to graduate school. Moishe Teitelbaum, 33, owns a tiny kosher dairy restaurant, Matamim, in Brooklyn that has no old Jewish waiters. He says regretfully, "Waiters like that don’t have any value to the new generation. The new Jewish waiters are all strictly business. They get what you want; they bring it with a smile; they get their money and their tip. Nobody wants the old waiters, the ones who would talk with the customers about their grandmother’s recipe for matzo-ball soup. Nobody has time. The young Jewish customers have cell phones, beepers and two or three jobs."

_"The young Jewish guy of today, he’s above this kind of work," says Norman Moss, 75, who was born on the Lower East Side and is the oldest professional Jewish waiter I came across. "He’s more educated, travels more, and he’s into the twenty-first century, which does not include waitering anymore."

Moss has been at the Stage Deli in Manhattan for about a quarter century, pretty good for a man who has always thought of himself as an entrepreneur, not a waiter. Before coming to the Stage, he owned a Chock full o’ Nuts restaurant, an ill-fated franchise operation created by a pre-Starbucks coffee company. The specialty of the house was cream cheese-on-date-nut bread sandwiches.

From this he made a living? He did not. After that unsuccessful endeavor, he came to the Stage, where he credits his success to careful attention to customers. He won’t say he was the best Jewish waiter he ever saw. That would be Max Silver, now retired to Florida, who took such good care of his regulars that whenever one of them asked for raisin-pumpernickel bread, which the Stage never offered, Silver would go into the kitchen with a handful of raisins and press them into the pumpernickel bread with his thumb. Moss is good, though. While I am talking to him, a family from South America asks him for two French fries for a squirming boy. He brings three, and when he sets the plate down, he addresses the child by name.

"I’ve seen a couple waiters here, they believe if you put down a pastrami sandwich and a Dr. Brown’s cream soda and send out the check, that’s the job. But there’s more to it than that. Keep an eye out, extend yourself, and hope for a decent tip."

He’s not sure how long he plans to remain a waiter, because he and an associate have other plans. They’ve invested in a Web site with the name zygezunt.com16, a sure moneymaker, one way or another. "Maybe I’ll try to sell it," he says, "because I’m into the twenty-first century."

_

To understand what made Jewish waiters so unhappy, it is necessary to grasp this fact: In his heart, no Jew is a servant of another. The Bible is filled with stories of the rich and powerful who thought they could subjugate the Jews, only to find out otherwise17. The Jewish waiter might have schlepped18 between kitchen and dining room, but inwardly he knew he was destined for greater accomplishments. He was undereducated, which he regretted, because Jews cherish the scholarly. He was relatively poor, which was a tragedy, because all around him Jews were becoming big shots.

For an answer to the pain this must have caused, I turned to Jackie Mason, the greatest grassroots Jewish cultural anthropologist of our day. He was in his dressing room, preparing to go onstage for his one-man show, Much Ado About Everything.

"Jews always feel they have to get somewhere, and the waiters came here without an education and resented that they had to adjust," he explained. "Gentiles felt it was OK to be working-class, but Jews to this day come to this country, have to stand out, become somebody important, not just a working stiff.

"They were independent characters who had to be waiters, and they adjusted, but they resented their jobs, and they were left with hostility and frustrations and humor laced with a little venom. They convinced themselves that the whole world stunk, and so that it didn’t stink all by itself, they took it out on the customers. They were sure the restaurants weren’t what they once were and customers weren’t what they once were and nothing was like it once was. They adjusted, tried to make a comedy out of their jobs, translate their lives into vaudeville acts. It was their only outlet, but if that didn’t work, they took it out on their customers."

If the professional Jewish waiter became the master of contrarian service, then much of what he did could be justified on these grounds: "The people made them that way," says Morris Breitbart, 78, a manager at Ratner’s for fifty-one years. Seymour Paley, 70, owner of Corky’s, a Jewish-style restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, agrees: "Who can take the Jewish customers?" Harry Rasp, owner of the restaurant Essex on Coney in Brooklyn, adds, "The trouble with the Jewish customer is that the restaurant is only as good as the last meal he had. He has no memory of the previous 500 good ones. If the last one was not so good, I hear, ’Harry, you’re not running it the way you used to.’ "

"It was the customers," says Joseph Weingarten, 60, when I ask him why he left the Concord, one of the greatest of the Jewish resorts in the Catskills. "The chutzpah, the attitude. Always, it was the fardreyen kopf19".

Currently a waiter at New York’s Smith & Wollensky steak house, Weingarten was born in Romania and came to America in 1959. His first job was waiting at Grossinger’s, the snootiest of the Catskills resorts, and then he moved to the Concord, where he stayed for twelve years. A top waiter like him would be responsible for thirty to fifty customers at each seating, all of them demanding immediate attention. After all, they were paying $30 a day for room, entertainment, activities and three meals.

"The food was tremendous," he says. "Fourteen different juices, twenty different eggs, pancakes, waffles with vanilla ice cream, cheeses, fishes. How much could you eat? And they complained, oh, my God, they complained. It was amazing, and it broke my heart, because I came from World War II. I ate mamalig&#xE1;20 during the Russian occupation, 1945 to 1949, until I went to Israel in 1950.

"The customers would come in to breakfast. I remember this one lady, she said to me, ’Do you have oatmeal?’ I said yes, I had oatmeal. She said, ’I’ll have Wheatena.’ Then she started on the eggs, what kind you got? I told her, ’I got all kinds, soft-boiled, scrambled, hard-boiled, omelettes.’ She said, ’Give me shirred.’ It went on and on. There was another guy at one of my tables, one morning I had to give him a message. He read it, said, ’Joe, my brother died, can I have a cup of coffee?’ I bring him a cup of coffee, there’s always a piece of coffee cake that comes with the coffee, it’s on the dish.He looks at it and says, ’Is this the only kind of cake you got?’ How can he eat after that? Your brother died, you take your car, go home, why are you worried about the cake? "One customer, a lawyer, he had an appetizer, a salad, a bowl of matzo-ball soup, then he asked me what he should have next. I suggested roast capon with vegetables. He finished that, and the stuffed veal, and the pot roast with Yankee beans. After the pot roast, he wants pepper steak. I’m thinking, Is he an animal? I’ve got fifty other people I have to wait on. I say to him, ’Can I have a break now?’ He went to the ma&#xEE;tre d’, said he was insulted."

Still, Weingarten loved life in the Catskills—the women, the horses, the air. Jews spend so little time outdoors they tend to be exhilarated by oxygen, much like Gentiles inhaling the heady scent of a pickle barrel for the first time. "It was hard work, sometimes three weeks without a day off, and I was the number one waiter, people asked for me," he recalls. "They liked me because I got a good line with people; they like my jokes. One of my customers, a Jewish undertaker, he had a nice place on 91st Street. He leaves on a Sunday, hands me an envelope, shakes my hand, says, ’I’ll be seeing you.’ I said, ’I hope when you are seeing me, I should be able to look at you.’ "

Eager to find as many elderly Jewish waiters as possible, I started calling. I telephoned likely restaurants in Dallas, Berkeley, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Boston and Washington, D.C. I tried Connecticut, thinking some old Jewish waiters might have inexplicably migrated north to the Nutmeg State. I called all over New Jersey. I was certain I’d find a few in South Florida, but I did not. Not one in Miami or Miami Beach. If there is not a single elderly Jewish waiter at Wolfie’s in Miami Beach or at the Rascal House in North Miami Beach, is this not the apocalypse?

I called places with names like Saul’s, Hymie’s, Murray’s, Zaidy’s, Rubin’s and Larry’s. Except for New York City, I went zero-for-America. I started telephoning Quebec and didn’t find a single one at the famous Montreal Jewish restaurants Moishe’s and Schwartz’s.

After calling more than thirty restaurants and speaking to dozens of owners and managers, I was certain that only a few elderly Jewish waiters remained, all of them in Manhattan. Yet one authority disagreed with me. Jackie Mason, whose convictions about the state of Jewish waiters cannot be ignored21, insisted I would come across "eighty to 120" of them if I looked in Brooklyn. He pointed to the resurgence of kosher restaurants and Jewish community life there. I didn’t think he was right, but I went anyway. I drove through Flatbush, Borough Park and Williamsburg, the Jewish heartlands, and a few lesser-known Jewish areas in between. I poked my head into more than a dozen kosher and kosher-style restaurants, and almost everywhere the owners shook their heads, smiled and said they had no waiters like that anymore. Finally, I found Essex on Coney. Technically speaking, none of the waiters there qualified, since they didn’t meet my minimum requirement of 60 years of age. Still, they were too perfect to pass up. Luis Margulies, 51, the youngest of the old-style professional Jewish waiters I came across, immediately placed a dish of cholent22 in front of me, just so I’d have a taste. Another waiter, Norman Wasserberg, one month shy of his sixtieth birthday, told me he knew of no more than six or seven waiters like him still working in Brooklyn.

Margulies and Wasserberg were wearing semidressy outfits—open-collar white shirts, black vests, black pants, black shoes—spattered with food stains. They apologized for their appearance, explained that neatness was impossible with the clientele they had. Nobody who ate there wanted to sit for more than twenty minutes, and waiters had to dodge customers and one another as they scurried between kitchen and dining room.

This was all new to me. I understood that Jewish families of Eastern European descent weren’t obsessed with table etiquette—Jews were always too busy learning ethics to bother with manners. Nevertheless, I’d always believed that Jews ate slowly, since holiday meals, such as the Passover Seder, are long and contemplative. At Essex on Coney, I watched Jews eat as though the Cossacks23 had just come through the gates.

Three minutes later, they have their food and are eating. Their friend shows up, gets a menu, orders, appears not at all upset that her friends have started without her. She just eats faster, and the three finish together, as though the meal were choreographed.

"Throw it at the people, they eat it," Wasserberg says. "Soup, main dish, they want it all at once. The other day, I had a special event, twenty-seven people. I served twenty-seven stuffed cabbages, twenty-seven soups, they chose from three appetizers, they had a choice of five main dishes, they had dessert, and they were out in an hour and a half. And that was with two speeches."

He and Margulies start telling stories, trying to top each other. "I have people walk in," says Margulies. "While they’re walking to the table, they give you the order. Soup, appetizer, main dish, they want it all at once."

"I give them the check sometimes before I serve the food," Wasserberg says.

Margulies tells me about the time he was taking an order at one table and a customer at the next table started pulling on his pants leg, too impatient to wait his turn. Wasserberg says that with some families, if the man finishes first, he gets up and leaves the restaurant. They both recall a wedding where the guests started grabbing food from trays being brought from the kitchen.

They tell me the only people who ever eat slowly are young men and women meeting for the first time. Marriages are arranged in this Orthodox community, and the first meeting must take place decorously in a public place, not in a movie theater or in a car. If there is no magic, the young man and woman eat and are out in ten minutes. If they like each other, they might sit talking until the restaurant closes.

"They go home, tell the person who arranged it that they want to see each other," Margulies says. "They’re engaged in a week, married in three months and have the first baby nine months and a week later."_

Still, no waiters were quite like those at Ratner’s. They had more to offer. Like footwear. Charlie, one of the most famous, kept bos of shoes in his basement locker and sold them tableside while taking orders. Nobody could try them on, and nobody could get a refund. Whenever a customer came back to complain that the shoes he bought were too tight, Charlie would say, "Put them in water to stretch." Susan Friedland, a cookbook editor at HarperCollins, says that in 1970 she took a soft-spoken, non-Jewish friend of hers to Ratner’s, and he asked the waiter to substitute mashed potatoes for the boiled potatoes that came with the dish. As she recalls, "The waiter said, ’Sorry, that comes with boiled potatoes.’ My friend quietly said, ’I’d really like to substitute mashed potatoes.’ This went on and on. Finally, the waiter said, ’I’ll get you mashed.’ The dish came out, and it had four boiled potatoes on it. My friend said, ’Don’t you remember? I asked for mashed.’ The waiter picked up a fork, smashed down on the potatoes and said, ’There, you have mashed.’ "

Seymour Paley, the owner of Corky’s, says the reason he always preferred to hire Jewish waitresses for his place was his experiences with Jewish waiters. "I couldn’t stand them," he says. "I once walked into Ratner’s with my 12- year-old nephew, ordered lox and eggs, no onions. The kid couldn’t eat onions. The waiter brought it out, it had onions. I said to him, ’Didn’t I say, sir, no onions for the kid?’ The waiter said to me, ’C’mon, be a sport.’ "

_The oldest Jewish waiter at Ratner’s turns out to be Alex Hersko, 70, the very fellow I offended on my earlier visit. His partner, the Ethiopian woman who tried to introduce us, explains his rejection of my friendly overture. "That’s the way he is. When you’re that way for thirty years, you never change."

He either fails to recognize me or is polite enough to pretend that he does not. He tells me he was born in Romania, came to New York in 1970 by way of Israel and shortly after his arrival here was fortunate enough to be offered a job at Ratner’s. When he started there, only one of the waiters at Ratner’s wasn’t Jewish. "I can tell you, a Jewish waiter in a Jewish place, a Jewish customer comes in, he feels very comfortable, he feels it is like home. A Jew goes into a restaurant and the waiter is Gentile, he doesn’t feel the same. Start talking Yiddish and you’re friends immediately."

Hersko’s hairline is receding, which is not news where elderly Jewish waiters are concerned, but his six-inch, graying ponytail makes him one of a kind. He explains, "My wife started cutting my hair after I went to an Italian barber twenty years ago and he cut it like a German soldier’s. She cut it for fifteen years; then one day, a few years ago, she says she doesn’t want to cut my hair anymore, I should find a barber. I said, ’OK, I’ll let it grow.’ Now my steady customers, they ask for Alex with the ponytail."

He tells me about a regular customer who comes in every day after 3 P.M., always asks for a menu and always orders a bowl of potato soup, nothing more. I ask him if he is one of those waiters who know what a customer is going to order before he sits down.

"No," he says, "but I do know how much tip they are going to give. You can feel a good customer, a tipper, not a schnorrer24". He stares at me again, that same intimidating look. I nervously sip my seltzer, which suddenly tastes flat. He looks me up and down, nods to himself.

"You know what a schnorrer is?" he asks._

And so the epoch of the Jewish waiter ends. Hersko was everything I had hoped to find—a little too cranky and a little too caring, all at the same time. He even told me he wrote songs, not that they’ve done so well. For me, he represented thousands of waiters, tens of thousands of orders of fried cheese kreplach25, millions of trips to the kitchen and back. I asked what it meant to him to be the standard-bearer of a century of tradition, to be the oldest and quite possibly the last elderly Jewish waiter working on the Lower East Side.

"It doesn’t impress me," he replied.

KEY:

1. If you think the Puritans had problems, you don’t know from problems. back

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.